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A Call For Bipartisanship?
Last night, Bill Clinton's speech towed a very thinly drawn line. He made several good points about how Democrats and Republicans can and have worked together on important issues, saying that "Los Angeles is getting green and Chicago is getting an infrastructure bank because Republicans and Democrats are working together to get it." Clinton even points out how he has supported the endeavors of many Republican presidents: Eisenhower sending the National Guard to protect integration at Central High School, George W. Bush's PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) program, and Reagan's welfare reform, which Clinton helped Reagan work on. Clinton seems almost supportive of the Republican party at the beginning of his speech, but then turns around and says "Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn’t see it that way. They think government is always the enemy, they’re always right, and compromise is weakness." At this point, Clinton's speech begins to make an entirely different point. He moves from optimistically talking about how the two parties can work together, to pointing out a myriad of flaws within the current Republican Party, implying that, while the GOP may have once worked in a productive way, they don't anymore. These flaws he mentions may or may not be true, but Clinton's statement about Republicans seeing "compromise [as] weakness"seems hypocritical, considering that even as he criticizes the Republicans for not compromising, he himself is refusing to compromise by making a blanket statement that all current Republicans have the aforementioned negative characteristics.
Now, bashing the opposition is not an unusual practice at these conventions, but President Obama has been continually calling for bipartisanship throughout his time as president. He has appointed many Republicans in high places, such as John McHugh, the Republican Secretary of the Army, and Clinton praises this bipartisanship in his speech at the DNC. But Clinton himself still sticks to the tried and true practice of criticizing the "enemy," making statements that seem to run contrary to the cooperative message Obama is trying to send out. Perhaps we shouldn't try to expect any better, but in this time of politicians taking sides more than ever, don't these speeches passive-aggressively (or even just aggressively,) attacking the opposition only add to the problem? How can we have "change we can believe in" if the democrats stick to the same old tradition of making an enemy of the other party?
That said, Clinton does go on to make some more concrete statements about President Obama's worth, and about the Republican Party's shortcomings, (although some of his numbers were predictably fudged,) and he spoke about more than how horrible and incompetent the Republicans were before Obama took over and will be when they take over again. But some of Clinton's statements shone a light on an important issue: it is one thing to say that you want to be bipartisan. It is another thing to act on it.
The quotes were taken from the full transcript of Clinton's speech, which can be found here.
2 comments:
I think it's interesting how Clinton speech is relatively blatantly hypocritical. I think that Clinton's speech is a very clear and good example of the hypocrisy and false-ness that happens at the conventions. There is an obvious amount of scripted information (including false data) that people need to be more aware of. There is a lot that the politicians have asked for from the public, bipartisanship, that people don't look deeper into. People are unaware of the hypocrisy in what is being said and what is being acted on.
I agree that Clinton should have presented himself as bipartisan if he was going to emphasize it in his speech. The links to sites like FactCheck.org were helpful and shed light on the distorting mass of "spin" that is usually build up at these conventions.
Bill Clinton appears positive and uplifting at the start, creating some hope that the two political parties can work past their "various" differences. Of course, like in President Obama's speech, he does regretfully returns to the usual "I'm right and they're wrong" attitude and shifts his focus to poking around the Republicans. I find it difficult to accept Clinton's, or the other politicians', credibility if he acts hypocritically.
In the end, it is true that Clinton simply tries to appear "in-touch" by criticizing the bipartisanship of this era, but fails because he simply cannot follow his own advice.
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